What Rufus is up to: Recovering faster than we could’ve hoped, and back to his full (1- to 1.5-mile) walks! If he gets his endurance up by next weekend, we’ll take him out for a Sunday grey-hike!

Where I’m going: Nowhere. It’s a thrilling life, I tellsya.

What I’m happy about: That my wife, half-watching this trailer on Robert Wilonsky’sUltimate Trailer Show (which really should have its own website), perked up after a few seconds and said, “Oh, it’s the other guy from that Peter Riegert movie!” Which would be Local Hero. Which would be yet another reason why I love her so.

Also, we took one look at this movie —

— and she said, “It’s your boyfriend, Sam Rockwell!” Oh, and she took care of Rufus for a few hours on Saturday while I went out, ran some errands, and had a little time alone.

What I’m sad about: That Timoleon had to let his friends kill his brother Timophanes. (Seriously: Plutarch’s story of his life is just amazing, especially when he gets to the segment about Dionysus the younger’s post-tyrant life in Corinth.)

What I’m worried about: That I’ll go ever stir-crazier, working at home.

I saw Synecdoche, New York on Friday afternoon and I’ve spent this weekend trying to parse what I saw, heard and felt. I’ve even been struggling with the metaphor of how it’s affected me; I don’t want to ape the ongoingly-dying lead character by saying it’s infected me like a virus. I think it’s more like ink in water, gently dispersing, ever obscuring.

I watched Adaptation on Saturday night, in hopes that it would provide some clues into Synecdoche, since it seemed to be the most thematically similar of Mr. Kaufman’s previous screenplays. I was completely wrong, of course. Adaptation is about a man who can’t start, and Synecdoche is about a man who can’t stop. Also, Synecdoche isn’t about writing, but dying. It’s also a million times funnier than Adaptation, and the women are amazing. (Like Ebert, I won’t write about the actors or their performances.) Unfortunately, I caught a 1 p.m. screening, so the other dozen audience members were generally elderly people. They didn’t find it as humorous as I did.

For all the difficulties in the movie, I never felt like I was being sneered at by Mr. Kaufman. It felt more like he was struggling to convey the ineffable, knowing it’s ineffable. I still don’t get why Samantha Morton’s house was on fire, but this isn’t the sort of movie where misreading a symbol will derail your entire experience with it. At least, it wasn’t for me.

I almost drove back into NYC on Saturday to watch it again, but the DVD is coming out on March 10, so I preordered it. I have a feeling that I’ll ramble more about this movie in the next few months.